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Florida Lawmakers Have Just One Month ESI Retention

The Florida legislature routinely deletes all email after only one month, according to a recent article. As the article discusses, traditional arguments for such short retention are now very doubtful:

Storage is very cheap.

Email archiving solutions are readily available at a reasonable cost.

The article suggests, reasonably enough, that the main motivation of the Florida legislature is not to have ESI used against it; and in particular, to make it harder for the public to determine the truth behind some of its decisions and practices. If so, this is not satisfactory.

Organizations that continue to routinely delete email after 30 days should recognize that the cost of storage is now marginal. When justifying email archiving from a financial perspective, the key is to consider the cost of lost information.